that also open at the bottom of the
hull, called “bottom drop” in company terminology.

“We left space envelopes in our
design to not preclude being able to
do that in the future without snowballing the change into a bunch of
other things,” Hesch said. “We are
trying to stay with the rest of the fleet
on opportunities with payload.”

“We’re also looking at payload
systems that would allow us to
launch and retrieve payloads from
these tubes, consistent with some
experimentation that is going on
the [Ohio-class SSGN],” said
Thomas N. Plante, Electric Boat’s
program development manager for
the Virginia SSN.

Plante said the large-diameter
tubes are not as long, but have similar diameters, as the SSGN payload tubes. Electric Boat is looking
to leverage the capacity of the
large-diameter tubes as potential
launchers for unmanned aerial
vehicles, unmanned underwater
vehicles and special forces payloads, among others.

“The other thing we’re focused
on is improvement [of the] life-cycle
affordability of the class,” he said.

“The class design changes that improve [the] affordability of maintaining the ships as we build up the
fleet [is] a whole group of ideas and technologies that
we’re off to develop.”

With the necessity of keeping the cost of the submarine below $2 billion to afford two per year, life-cycle
affordability improvements can offset the additional
cost of new or improved capabilities in the coming
production blocks.

“Efforts are under way to identify and pursue new technologies and design changes that would enhance the
Block IV’s warfighting capabilities while reducing construction and total ownership costs,” said the NAVSEA
spokesman. “This early work will focus the program
office’s efforts so that it invests in only those areas that provide the best capability at an appropriate cost.

“Specific examples of new technologies include a
flexible payload sail, conformal acoustic velocity sensors
wide aperture array, payloads that take advantage of the
payload tubes that are part of the Block III and future
Virginias, and technologies and design modifications

GENERAL DYNAMICS ELECTRIC BOAT

Work is expected to begin on the first boat of Block III of the Virginia class of submarines this fiscal year. Among the cost-saving measures designed for Block III subs
are a redesigned bow section that replaces the spherical sonar with large aperture
sonar and the 12 single-cell Tomahawk cruise missile vertical-launch tubes with two
large-diameter tubes capable of carrying the Multiple All-up-round Canister. Virginia,
the lead boat of the Virginia class, shown here, was commissioned in 2004.

“We believe that the savings are accurate, so much
so that we’ve built it into our pricing strategy in doing
the Block III contracts,” he said. “That’s certainly a testament of our commitment.”

Holmander said Electric Boat included more than
100 separate design initiatives that were mature
enough for fixed-price proposals in the technical baseline for Block III.

“We’ve had a bunch of additional projects in process
that were not mature enough that we see could be
potentially incorporated in the future,” he said. “We
are actively working with the Navy to figure out what
[each project’s] place is in the program, so there could
be some additional savings.”

The redesigned Block III bow is a major stepping-off
point for features being considered for Block IV. The
two large-diameter payload tubes on Block III feature
hatches that open only on the top of the bow. Electric
Boat is looking at modifying the tubes with hatches